Cost-effective Ethernet routing schemes for dynamic environments

Design of aggregation networks for delivering multimedia services to fast moving users is an interesting topic. Research has already been devoted to the dimensioning taking into account the movement of the users. However, the effects of packet loss and packet reordering when switching paths have not been taken into account before. This paper presents a design method that aims at minimizing packet loss and packet reordering in the dimensioning and routing process. Consequently, various routing techniques are presented and their performance is thoroughly compared. The results show that for some routing strategies only a slight extra installation cost is required for guaranteeing minimal packet loss and reordering. Deployment of routing schemes in Ethernet networks requires mapping of the calculated routes on different spanning tree instances. A path aggregation algorithm is presented that forms a minimal set of spanning tree instances out of a set of routing paths.